lurches toward low-budget incoherence

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2003)

I was really looking forward to this film, but the thought of it now irritates me intensely. Ironically, one of the sleugh of rotten lottery-funded brit flicks, it finally did some business in the US (about $45m) just as the lottery commission pulled the plug on the companies which had produced a string of flops.
So it's not Strictly Sinatra, but what ARE its redeeming qualities? What makes this film like tootache is its pretensions to big budget apocalyptic-ness when it was painfully, obviously shot on tuppence 'happeny, especially near the end when the cast run around a country house they have hired for the weekend with some extras dressed in army surplus.
All credit to the showreel editor who took the best 90 seconds of the film - the deserted london and motorway bits - and cut all of it it into the trailer. That packed them in in the states.
However, the plot is utterly pedestrian and the flow of the film appalling. Certain scenes make no sense other than to create suspense - wandering into a deserted, blacked-out cafe without protection, for example. How Alex could have emerged unscathed, why the radio didn't pick up signals from the uninfected continent. The film fails to add up - but then it never tries.
The political/ecological overtones are laughable - the science of a 10 second demonic virus is utterly absurd, and never could have caused a pandemic. The end third of the film, which is meant to be some sort of satire on how we are all animals an inch before the surface is pathetic and predictable, especially its distasteful overtones of anti-white racism: but then that subject is the signature titillation of the liberal classes.
The concept can be done so much more suggestively and effectively with an equally low budget - Romero's Dead trilogy is so much powerful and captures the sense of decay from the perspective of a single room, a shopping mall and a military installation far more convincing than the barbed-wire Chatsworth created by Boyle.
Obviously Boyle and Garland were fans themselves as they crib ideas from these films mercilessly.
The jury is out on the use of DV. It has a stylistic novelty for use in the cinema, but often the visuals are hard to make out rather than evocative.

It seemed like a good idea when I bought the tickets, but 2 hours later I changed my mind.